See how Pipedrive improves their CRM using customer feedback

Customer feedback is an important part of almost any process imaginable. We talked to Pipedrive’s Product Manager, Ksenia Chaynikova and Research Team Lead, Paula Koppel to examine this statement and discuss how Pipedrive uses Survicate across multiple teams to deliver a product that meets their needs.

Let’s start with Pipedrive. Could you describe your service?

Ksenia Chaynikova: Pipedrive is a sales CRM that makes selling simple. We’re on a mission to make salespeople unstoppable. Pipedrive keeps things moving, stops tasks from falling through the cracks, and kills the tedium of admin. Pipedrive is designed by salespeople for salespeople to make sure sales activities remain targeted, ambitious, and realistic.

Why have you decided to survey your customers?

K.C. Primarily, we wanted to gather insights about the processes sales professionals use via customer interviews. We can combine this information with data we can extract from Pipedrive product usage.

Internally, we have decided to use surveys when we want to profile our customers to pick the right interviewees, when we want to use the MaxDiff method to prioritize customer needs, or when we want to collect a rather large amount of background information about salespeople and managers.

And yes, of course, we’re using Pipedrive to keep track of the communications with our customers and document all the research findings!

We also distribute surveys to customers at a specific point in their life cycle to help us identify a particular behavior trigger. We understand that customer journey doesn’t concentrate exclusively on product’s features usage.

We need to understand the reasons why a prospect wants to start using a CRM. Is there something wrong with the sales process? And most importantly, what prompted the user to start looking for the CRM in the first place?

The same thing applies to the whole customer journey. We’re not exclusively asking our prospects about the certain parts of the problem they need solving. Instead, we want to analyze the stages in their sales process and their entire team performance. I think the customer journey should be scrutinized and studied with this perspective. There is so much you can learn about how the product will be used.

Why is user feedback important in product management?

Paula Koppel: Feedback about our most up-to-date product is very important in helping us understand key strengths and weaknesses. Feedback about mock-ups and prototypes is crucial to building the right things in the right way.

In the long-term, researching how salespeople and their managers work and what they struggle with is the most valuable knowledge. Because feedback comprises only the existing design/is about something that is already there. Researching how they work to identify how we can improve their workflows feeds our innovation.

How is Intercom + Survicate Integration used at Pipedrive?

K.C. Intercom is used by multiple Pipedrive teams to provide our customers with a smoother product customisation experience. The integration between Survicate and Intercom is mainly used to gather quantitative customer feedback that serves as our starting point for qualitative research.

The Survicate Intercom Integration helps us complete the task of surveying customers in a smooth, seamless manner without bothering them too much and interrupting their workflow. And, I know for a fact that untimely redistributed questions are as harmful as badly designed ones.

What other channels do you use to distribute surveys?

K.C. Surveys are normally distributed via emails or in-app with a communication platform, or they’re built into the app itself.

How do you act on the survey data you collect?

K.C. Surveys help us to begin with a hypothesis. After completing a survey we can cluster answers together to find insights about trends and identify the core reasons for particular behavior. Surveys are also the first step we need to execute before we proceed to further in-depth interviews.

Do you survey your trial customers?

K.C. Yes, whenever our trials deciding to shift away from Pipedrive. It’s crucial for us to get to know them better. We always want to discover what these users didn’t find in Pipedrive and why they decided not to continue using our CRM. We use a combination of Survicate and ESP (Email Service Provider) to generate the kind of insights we need to improve the clarity and effectiveness of our onboarding.

Were there any ‘aha’ moments, when a user directed your attention to some issue you didn’t previously know about?

P.K. There is definitely more than one, but there is a certain instance that springs to mind. Late last year, we used the MaxDiff method to understand what the main user needs are when salespeople are on the go (on their way to meet a customer, heading to the office, etc). Simply, our product managers want a more intimate understanding of what salespeople need in their mobile app.

Until then, we had thought about improving reporting views in the mobile app. Results of this survey made us realize reporting is not a critical use case for the mobile app. Instead, salespeople are most concerned about accessing and quickly entering information about their leads and customers.

Why do you value Survicate?

K.C. Survicate is one of the tools that is used by several Pipedrive teams – it’s simple yet has the necessary functionality and integrations both with in-app messaging platforms (Intercom) and email automation platforms that allows personalization and reduces our manual workload.

Also at Pipedrive we value the concept of keeping user data safe. We are transparent about all the processes the data gets involved too. It was crucial for us that the survey tool we choose will have the same approach as we. We knew Survicate ensures the maximum security for the customer data.

What convinced you to use our service?

K.C. We needed to quickly start gathering knowledge about specific parts of our product. We also needed highly personalized emails to be created. To avoid the hassle of sending the message manually, we ran the first campaign using the ESP and Survicate integration. This let our product team quickly cluster the answers and make an important decision about moving forward with several design decisions.

How does Survicate stand against its competition?

K.C. I guess it depends on what is needed from the product; we’ve hired Survicate to create surveys that integrate with communication platforms we’re currently using, but at the same time, they are simple enough for non-tech professional to master.

What do you think people have to learn about surveying customers?

K.C. I think the most important rule that we at Pipedrive follow is not to ask twice for the same information. It’s such an obvious thing, but as a user myself I know that so many companies are forgetting this.

For example, a tool I’ve been using now for two years sends me a survey in their web-app, and the first thing they ask me is my name and email. They already have this information. When customers use a tool they create a sort of relationship, but I think it’s often only one-way connection.

Why is the simplicity of tools so important?

K.C. We are all different in our daily routines so we needed to make sure the survey tool is intuitive to use. It should be easy to explain how to create surveys and how to launch these surveys to our customers. We expect this to be very intuitive because there will be newcomers using the survey tool. That was actually one of the criteria that Survicate nailed.

Survicate is easy to master, so this friction point is removed. Imagine you need to clarify and select the specific interface of your interview and then you have a very short amount of time to schedule the interview. You need to be sure the process is not broken and the survey covers only those who were actually intended to be there.

The tool is simple but gives you the ability to customize with robust integrations without complicating the interface. This product philosophy is really similar to Pipedrive, so our entire team appreciates the simplicity and usability of the tool.

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